Individual Voter Registration

Wayne David Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

My hon. Friend makes a good point, and there was a certain amount of fraud in the early 2000s. That is why the previous Government, to be fair and to their credit, tightened up postal voting and introduced the system of requiring identifiers, whereby an individual has to have their date of birth and provide a signature. We can at least be sure that the person who requested the postal vote is the person casting it, but of course it does not give us any confidence in that person being the real, genuine person who lives in that house, as someone may have created a fictitious identity. We can be sure that the person who requested the postal vote is the person casting it, but they could do so on the basis of a completely fictitious identity. Postal voting has been tightened up, and that is good. It is something that we supported and which the previous Government did.

Another reason for speeding up the system is that running parallel systems—the current system and the new system—was likely to be rather confusing and was, I have to say, going to cost a significant amount. We are investing a significant sum in getting this right—[Interruption.] If the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane) just lets me finish, we are going to spend £108 million on moving to the system of registration, so we are fully funding the move, and by not trying to run it in parallel with the current system we have saved £74 million, which, given the state of the economy and the public finances that we inherited, a point that I will not labour, is not an insubstantial factor to bear in mind. But it is not at the expense of ensuring that we have a secure and accurate register.

[Mr Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)]

The Minister has mentioned postal voting and how important it is becoming in our electoral system. Why are the Government not prepared to consider a carry-forward of current postal voters on to the new register?

[Mr Harper]

The reason for the carry-forward was to ensure that people who had been registered to vote but had not registered once under the new system did not suddenly discover that they were not able to vote at the general election. The carry-forward was a check. In an ideal world, one would introduce a new system and not bother having the carry-forward. It was a safety net.

As I said to my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), although postal voters provide identifiers, those do not provide any confidence or evidence that the voter is a real person. They provide confidence that the person casting the postal vote is the person who applied for the postal vote, but they do not get around the problem of people being able to create fictional identities and carry out postal vote fraud. We therefore did not think that it was sensible to extend the carry-forward to postal votes. There will still be carry-forward on the register, so people will still be able to vote, but we will not carry forward people’s absent vote. We do not think that that is likely to cause an enormous problem. The hon. Member for Caerphilly should wait for us to respond to the report of the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee in the not-too-distant future, because I think he will be reassured by our answers.

As I made clear to the House in my statement last September, we are focused as much on completeness as accuracy. We instigated and funded the independent research by the Electoral Commission to see what state the current registration system was in. That should make us pause to reflect. When we have discussed this matter previously, there has been a complacent view that everything is fine, that there are not many problems, and that we are at risk of tampering with the system and causing a problem. The fact is that the current system is not as good as people thought it was.

I made the point that in Northern Ireland, where individual registration was introduced and where it now has a number of continuous registration mechanisms, such as putting back the carry-forward and using data matching, the system is now as complete as and more accurate than that in the rest of the United Kingdom. That demonstrates that if we do this well, learning the lessons from Northern Ireland, looking at things such as data matching and carrying out the proposal sensibly by having pre-legislative scrutiny and listening to what people have to say, we will not damage the registration system, as the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd said, but have a more accurate and complete register over time than the one we have today.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)]

Today’s debate has been a good one, with contributions from about 20 Members, and no one has spoken against the principle of individual electoral registration. Some Members are entirely happy with the Government’s proposals—I am thinking of the hon. Members for Peterborough (Mr Jackson) and for Burton (Andrew Griffiths)—but a number of Members on both sides of the House have expressed reservations. They include my hon. Friends the Members for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane) and for Llanelli (Nia Griffith), the hon. Member for Ceredigion (Mr Williams) and my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh), among many others.

Significantly, Members’ concerns are reflected in the opinions of many others outside the House who share our belief in the importance of representative democracy. The Electoral Commission, in particular, has made trenchant but very constructive criticisms, and the worries that Members have expressed today are increasingly expressed by those who recognise that the devil is in the detail of the Government’s proposals. As Members have said, we are discussing a huge change to our voting system. This is an issue that deserves to be understood and widely debated the length and breadth of our country. It is far too important to be the preserve of academics and political anoraks.

The Opposition believe that there is a very strong case for individual electoral registration in principle: it can reduce electoral fraud and is in tune with the modern structure of today’s families. Indeed, the previous Labour Government,’s proposals for the introduction of IER commanded a cross-party consensus. Unfortunately, the Government have ended any idea of a bipartisan approach towards constitutional reform, and their plans for IER have placed a question mark over the future integrity of the electoral register.

In the Government’s IER White Paper, electoral registration is seen no longer as an individual’s civic duty but as

“a matter of choice for the individual”.

At present, if the head of a household fails to co-operate with an electoral registration officer and does not return a completed electoral registration form, they can be fined £1,000. The Government say that that will remain—indeed it will—but crucially the obligation will not apply to individuals, yet this is all about individual electoral registration. Instead, individuals will now be invited to join the electoral register if they are so inclined.

We can easily visualise an ERO—if, indeed, there are EROs in the future—knocking on the door of someone’s home. A busy young mum comes to the door in the middle of making her children’s tea. The registration officer asks that young mum if she would like to fill in a form to be on the electoral register by writing down her date of birth and national insurance number. The busy mum explains that she is in the middle of making the kids’ tea and asks the ERO whether she really has to fill in the form. The ERO says, “No, it’s a matter of personal choice.” The predictable reply is, “Fine, in that case I won’t bother. I have to make the kids’ tea. Goodbye.”

Come the general election, that young mum believes that she has an opportunity to shape the country that her children are growing up in. She wants her children to have the best possible education and to have jobs when they grow up, and she wants her family to live in a safe community. She has taken the trouble to read all the parties’ manifestos and she has given careful thought to how she is going to cast her vote. She then goes along to her polling station on election day, but when she gets there she is told that she cannot vote because she is not on the electoral register.

Our fear is that millions of young mums will be excluded from the democratic process because they are not on the electoral register. All the evidence suggests that the young, the disabled, members of the black and ethnic minority communities, those who frequently move and people living in private rented and public housing will be the people most likely not to be on the electoral register under the Government’s proposals. These are the people who are threatened with disfranchisement.

The impartial Electoral Commission has predicted that if the Government do not change their plans, in some areas the number of people on the electoral register could be as low as 60% of the population. The number of people on the electoral register also determines the shape and size of our parliamentary constituencies. Members do not need reminding that we are going through a parliamentary boundary review. In 2015, there will be another boundary review, and if the electorate has been significantly reduced in certain areas, we will see further boundary changes that will have a big impact on inner-city and less prosperous areas of the country.

The electoral register is a foundation on which our representative democracy is built, so it is wrong that it is being put in danger by these proposals, but, as Members have highlighted, it is important for other reasons too, and I will refer briefly to two. First, credit rating agencies regularly refer to the electoral register when deciding whether to provide a loan or mortgage to an individual or family. If someone is not on the electoral register, their chances of securing a loan are diminished. Secondly, in our legal system, juries are drawn from the electoral register. If our electoral register comprises a disproportionately large number of white, middle-aged, elderly and middle-class people, the likelihood is that our juries will reflect that. At a time when it is so important that we build trust in our criminal justice system and the rule of law, it is imperative that we have juries in which people can have faith and confidence.

I welcome the Government’s confirmation that they intend to drop their permanent opt-out option—that is one less drop of venom—but we will look carefully at what the Government actually propose in their Bill, and I have to say that they will need to make many more changes before their plans are acceptable. Before they publish their IER Bill, I urge them to stop and listen to the many informed voices now urging them to change their proposals. In particular, I urge them to heed the advice of the Electoral Commission, which has argued that there should be a full household canvass in 2014. It is right about that.

At the same time, the Government should use the opportunity to explain to electors that the system is changing and publish a detailed implementation plan when they introduce their primary legislation. Moreover, they should ensure that a consistent electoral service is provided to all parts of the country and that sufficient resources are provided to guarantee that as many people as possible are on the electoral register.

The Political and Constitutional Reform Committee has produced an excellent report on IER. I congratulate the Committee on its work and its Chairman, my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen), on his first-rate speech this evening. I now urge the Government to act upon the Committee’s eminently sensible proposals, and I would like to refer to one of those proposals in particular. As well as broadly supporting the Electoral Commission’s views, the Committee has recommended that the Government allow postal and proxy voting to be carried forward to the 2015 general election. I think that makes sense, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.

Finally, above all else I urge the Government to recognise that being on the electoral register is a civic duty and not a lifestyle choice. Surely every Member in this House believes that our parliamentary democracy needs the active participation of the people of this country in the democratic process. Surely we should do all we can to have as many people as possible on the electoral register. The essential point is that people can choose whether or not to exercise their right to vote only if they are on the electoral register. I therefore urge the Government to listen to the genuine voices of concern and ensure that their Bill reinforces our democracy, rather than undermine it.